Confirmed: Google Penguin 3.0 released late Friday Night (17th October)

[Robert Charlton]

Per Barry, it's now official, but details still forthcoming...

Confirmed: Google Penguin 3.0 Released Late Friday Night
updated midday Sun Oct 19, 2014
by Barry Schwartz
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-3-19313.html [seroundtable.com]

Update & Confirmed: Google Sunday afternoon has confirmed they have done a Penguin update. I am trying to get more details at this moment.

From Barry's original report, dated Oct 18...

Special Report: Google Penguin 3.0 Likely Released Saturday Morning

I am working on getting confirmation from Google but I have never seen the forums light up as much as they are now...

...It is unclear if this is a refresh to the Penguin algorithm or a revised algorithm update. Again, I am waiting to get more details from Google on this.

But it seems like 90%+ of SEOs are in agreement that Google refreshed Penguin over the weekend. Will they reverse it? Was it a test? Will it stick? That is the big question.

PS: Thanks to member elguiri for spotting this in the Google Updates thread [webmasterworld.com...]

[rish3]

Now, if I could just get Apple to give me an iPhone, an iPad, or a Macbook Air in return for letting its bot crawl my site....

I'll ship you an old iPhone in exchange for less trolling :)

[SnowMan68]

Now, if I could just get Apple to give me an iPhone, an iPad, or a Macbook Air in return for letting its bot crawl my site....

LOL! :) It's a privilege, not a right to get Google organic traffic. Same goes for them. That's the beauty of the interwebs. Free info, if you don't like it, then block them.

[rish3]

Free info

From where does this "free info" originate?

[SnowMan68]

From where does this "free info" originate?

Where you don't have to pay to read or view whatever is on their website. Isn't that what the majority of the web is, free information?

[rish3]

Where you don't have to pay to read or view whatever is on their website.

Right. What I'm saying is that, within the SERPS, the "whatever you aren't paying to read or view" is content created by people other than Google.

I'm giving away free views of the sky from my backyard :)

[IanCP]

@Redbar

one 14 years old and hardly touched since launch and back on 1st/2nd pages again

I've noticed a welcome spike, similar aged sites.

We will see if it is enduring. I don't consider anything under three months to be a trend.

[Nutterum]

@IanCP - finally some words worth reading.

A quick question though, for the people that run adwords with their website properties. Do you see changes in traffic and customer behaviour since last Friday.

I am still digging to see if there is some combined Panda refresh+Pinguin sweep that changed the way SERPs are being displayed to the users.

I believe that some of the searches in the SERP got a whole new set of traffic that caters better to the actual search query, especially when it comes to dodgy words with dual or triple meaning. I think I am right in my assumption but I need more imput from you guys.

Thoughts?

[samwest]

Sometimes I wish Google algorithm updates worked like Apple announcements. Huge conference where they share all the updates and details.
What a world that would be.

That's called full disclosure and Google avoids it like the plague.

[Nutterum]

And that is the most normal thing Google should do. Otherwise we would have fully spammed up SERP results, like in 2008-2009 - yeah thanks but no thanks I say.

[mrengine]

Is anyone noticing a rollback or is penguin still shuffling? Some websites (not all) that I monitored which saw very small improvements are right back where they were before penguin hit.

Also for my site, an internet forum thread from a couple years back is ranking on the first page of Google where it was before penguin was released. The forum is about internet technology, but the keyword it ranks for is a mechanical component used in an industry that has nothing to do with the internet. Though this ranked forum thread is not spam, it is very weak in terms of value and always baffled me as to why Google would put it on the first page of the search results.

[SnowMan68]

Noticing a lot of shuffling today. Search something three times and it's always a different result. Something is churning.

[RedBar]

is penguin still shuffling?

It's definitely still shuffling on G.co.uk for my widgets and I'm still seeing far too many irrelevant US results making it necessary to drill down several pages before finding UK results.

I'm glad I use Bing since this is becoming exasperating at times.

[IamnotMattCutts]

Me too - I'm seeing it across a few of my websites (UK) I think we are about to go again.

[muzza64]

I think we are about to go again

Well, it is Halloween. Trick or treat.

[RedBar]

It's definitely not a treat at the moment, just very messy with seemingly no coherence therefore the results extremely haphazard whereas Bing is 80% relevant.

This is for my widgets, YMMV.

[seoskunk]

Trick !

[JesterMagic]

Well it has been almost 3 weeks since Penguin 3.0 launched. Anyone think it is still running? Pierre said it would take a few weeks...

I was hoping Penguin would become a monthly thing but it looks like not yet.

[seroundtable.com...]

I hope we see Penguin 3.1 (or what ever it is called) at least sometime this winter.

[Kelowna]

you will have to wait another year. time to make some $$$ while we wait.

[souvik_2002]

@Kelowna +1

[petehall]

Well it has been almost 3 weeks since Penguin 3.0 launched. Anyone think it is still running? Pierre said it would take a few weeks...

Surely they'll at least let us know once it's over?

[RedBar]

I'm still seeing some bouncing about with some sites actually experiencing significant traffic boosts in the last few days.

[netmeg]

I saw something on Twitter yesterday to the effect that it was still going, but I didn't have time to investigate. But it was from someone who would be likely to know.

[Rockyou]

Looks like it is testing the system.

[netmeg]

Ok here it is:

[thesempost.com...]

[JesterMagic]

Thanks netmeg... (BTW nice new badges from WebmasterWorld I see) in my niche point of view I am surprised Penguin is still running. I am seeing a little bit of flux but nothing more than normal that could be assumed to be from regular algorithm tweaks.

I wonder if the updated algo for Penguin is applied right away across the board (hence the large amount of changes seen on day 1) and it is the update data that takes a while to roll out that smooths out the more intense traffic spikes (either up or down) that some sites see.

[Shai]

Client of ours just pointed out something quite interesting relating to the cache dates. Many sites I have checked all seem to still be stuck on October 20/21/22. Just checked one of our competitive terms and the vast majority of the sites on page 1 all had that date range.

[besnette]

My site has never been negatively affected by Penguin (thankfully). It shouldn't - it has a solid, natural, extremely strong link profile.
What makes me nervous, is that, every time I look at the latest links in WMT, there's a whole new round of really bad sites linking to mine all over the place (in addition to natural, good ones).

Disavowing is becoming a full-time job to keep up with these crappy, irrelevant sites that love to link to mine 100's of times over.

I am sure that other site owners have dealt with this too?

I hope that Google can tell when a site can 'fly on it's own' based on the good links alone, and discount the bad ones, regardless of disavowal.

It's sort of a Catch-22. The better your site does, the more it attracts the bad, with the good.

[supercyberbob]

If they could tell the good links from bad, they wouldn't need us to be their unpaid web spam interns with the disavow bull.

Just submit a couple million random URLs in your disavow file. That'll teach em.

[netmeg]

My site has never been negatively affected by Penguin (thankfully). It shouldn't - it has a solid, natural, extremely strong link profile.
What makes me nervous, is that, every time I look at the latest links in WMT, there's a whole new round of really bad sites linking to mine all over the place (in addition to natural, good ones).

If you've never suffered because of them, then why are you doing disavowal files?

[glakes]

If you've never suffered because of them, then why are you doing disavowal files?

With a year between updates, I don't blame anyone who wants to be proactive in avoiding penalties. In fact I think the long length of time between penguin updates is Google's way of nudging everyone to use the disavow tool.